THREE COLORS: BLUE (1993)

A.K.A.: Trois Couleurs: Bleu

Country: France / Poland / Switzerland

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Cast: Juliette Binoche / Benoit Regent / Charlotte Very

Plot

A woman tries to start a new life after losing her husband and daughter in a car accident.

What I Liked

The previous movie I reviewed here, “Now, Voyager,” was a drama built around the intensity of human passion and pain, a high quality melodrama.  “Three Colors: Blue” deals with similar themes, but in a way that is much more personal.  Juliette Binoche is nothing short of devastating in her portrayal of a widow of a famous composer, seeking to escape all memories of her past and build a new life for herself as though the previous never existed.  The success of the movie’s plot and meaning rests almost entirely on Binoche’s shoulders and she carries that weight with aplomb.  The strength of her performance is in her silence, her looks, gestures, and silent tears.  Her character does not moan and sob like those in “Now, Voyager,” but rather shows her pain through her efforts to ignore the hurt.  It is a performance deftly crafted out of subtlety, empathy, and self-assurance.

Binoche’s performance is exactly what is needed for “Three Colors: Blue,” a perfect fit for the puzzle that is the overall film.  Director Krysztof Kieslowski gives poetic meaning to the minutiae of everyday existence that would normally be dismissed as most trivial.  Moments like a droplet of coffee sitting on a saucer or a close-up of an eyeball moving about in its socket are interlaced between moments of recognizable tragedy and anguish within the narrative of the plot.  Binoche and Kieslowski show us that the tragic beauty (and sometimes even the heroism) of being human can be found in every fleeting instant of our lives.

What I Didn’t Like

This movie does exactly what it clearly set out to do, all of which I’ve gone over above.  In terms of accomplishing its goals, “Three Colors: Blue” is flawless.  However, there will be those, who will not appreciate those goals.  It could certainly be argued that watching the movie is too much of an intellectual enterprise than an emotional experience.  It is possible to spend too much of the film trying to recognize all that the filmmakers are trying to convey through their art, as opposed to sitting back and enjoying a moving film.  For me, though, I found the film a perfect balance, the intellectual strengths coming from Kieslowski’s eye for detail and the emotional catharsis from Binoche’s performance.

Most Memorable Scene

In case we miss the point of the film’s more subtle moments, there is particularly fascinating moment about half way through the film where Binoche’s character is sitting on a park bench and closes her eyes.  Doing so, she misses the sight of a decrepit, bent-backed, old woman hobbling down the sidewalk from who knows how far away to come to a recycle container.  The hole in which she is to insert her glass bottle is at least three feet over the woman’s head, yet somehow she manages to wrench, stretch, and contort herself over an agonizing period of just a few seconds just to get that bottle where it needs to go.  By the time Binoche opens her eyes, the old woman has hobbled out of view and our main character has missed a truly remarkable moment in her own life.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5